by Guy Burt
I find myself searching the darkness at the head of the valley for the winking green light that is my signal, but I am more than forty years too late. There is nothing there, and yet I still can’t get rid of it: the suspicion that I might catch it out of the corner of my eye – the three blinks of green from up by the dandelion clock that mean it is time to set off.
I shake my head. There is no hermit any more. There never was a hermit; not a real one.
I look up at the sky again. It’s not the time of year for the shooting stars yet; a few months must pass before the Perseids wash through the Earth’s orbit and burn briefly through the high atmosphere. Jamie tells me all about them. We watch them together.
‘There’s one – over there.’
I turn my head a fraction and catch the last dying trace of light as the star burns out. ‘That’s fourteen,’ I say.
‘They’re great, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah.’
‘People say you should wish when you see one.’
‘We should do that.’
‘OK. On the next one.’
‘We could have had fourteen wishes by now,’ I say.
‘Do you believe in all that?’
‘All what?’
‘Wishes and stuff.’
I think about it. ‘I don’t think so,’ I say at last.
‘Me neither.’ I can hear the grin in his voice as he adds, ‘But let’s do it anyway.’
We wait until the next star cuts across the sky.
‘What did you wish for?’ I ask.
‘It’s a secret,’ he says. ‘You have to keep them a secret if you want them to come true.’
‘Oh.’
‘They aren’t really stars, you know,’ he says. He speaks quietly, almost dreamily. ‘They’re pieces of rock. Meteors. They drift through space, and once a year this big sort of cloud of them – it’s called a swarm – comes. They go round the sun, you see, like us, only we only catch up with them once a year. And then they burn up.’
‘Why do they burn up?’
‘Because of the air.’
‘Rocks don’t burn,’ I say.
‘Yes they do. Look at volcanoes. That’s rock.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. He’s right. ‘Why does the air make them burn?’
‘There’s another.’
‘I see it. Sixteen.’
Jamie stretches his arms behind his head and cradles it in his hands. ‘They move really fast. Much faster than anything else – cars or jets or anything. So fast that when they rub against the air it makes them hot. Like when you rub your hands together it makes them hot, you know?’
‘Air makes you cold,’ I say.
‘Not when you’re going as fast as a shooting star,’ he says.
We are lying on our backs on the gentle slope of the roof outside my window. The terracotta tiles under us are still slightly warm from the sunlight they’ve soaked up during the day, and though it is half-past eleven, the air is easy and fragrant with the scents of pine and rock. It is August. We have waited until the sounds of my parents going to bed have ceased and the house is silent, before climbing out.
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ I say.
‘I read it. I’ve got lots of books.’
‘I know,’ I say.
‘Everyone thinks I’m pretty clever, but I just read a lot.’
‘I wonder why they don’t teach us anything like this at school?’ I say.
‘Maybe they will later. There’s another.’
‘Seventeen.’
* * *
Two years pass from the time Jamie and I first meet. For a short while, I catch him up: I’m eight, and for the next couple of weeks, so is he. It is the same the previous summer, this short time when our ages overlap: and then his birthday will come and he’ll jump ahead of me again. But even though he’s older, it never seems to distance him from me. We are firm friends now – best friends – and after school, and in the holidays, we are hardly ever apart. Around Altesa, we are recognized as a pair, a duo; like the superheroes in Jamie’s comics, I sometimes tell myself.
It is the comics, and Jamie, which are responsible for what my mother calls ‘the miracle’.
It happens soon after we have met. Jamie’s father comes to our house one evening, and he and my parents sit out on the verandah and talk, and drink gin and tonic and fresh lemonade which Lena takes out to them. I have to go and say hello: Jamie’s father is Mr Anderson and he also says Pleased to meet you, though it sounds different to the way Jamie says it; almost as if he’s amused at something. They are out there for a long time; I peep round the sitting-room door to see them out there, their backs to me.
At last, Mr Anderson goes. My father walks him to the gate, and they’re talking as they go. They seem to be getting on pretty well, I think. My mother comes inside.
‘He was very nice,’ she says. ‘Do you know, Alex, he used to live in London too, before he came to Italy?’
London is a vague impression of green carpets, and a little wooden train; long, green curtains; and cold. I know, because I have been told, that we lived there when I was three, but to me it feels like that must have been another Alex; I remember hardly anything of it. London really does feel like a dream. I say, ‘Oh.’
‘And Mrs Anderson comes from Italy. You’ll meet her at the weekend – they’re coming for dinner.’
My father comes back a few minutes later. He seems pleased with himself. ‘Fancy that,’ he says. ‘It’s a small world all right.’
‘I can’t help feeling we’re becoming like a little colonial outpost,’ my mother says. ‘The Brits at the head of the valley.’
‘Nonsense,’ my father says, but I think from the way he says it that the idea doesn’t strike him as entirely unwelcome. ‘Anyway, Alex seems to have been successful in his diplomatic overtures.’
I look up at the mention of my name, and they both smile at me. ‘Daddy means you were lucky to make friends so quickly,’ my mother says.
‘It’ll be nice for him,’ my father says thoughtfully, as if I am not in the room. ‘Having someone his own age close by. We’re too far from the town up here. It’ll help keep his English up, too.’ My father doesn’t know that when Jamie and I are alone, we never talk in English. He looks back to me. ‘We don’t want you going native on us, do we?’ he says with a smile. I don’t know how to answer that, so I keep quiet.
When the weekend comes and Jamie’s family arrives, my mother welcomes them all into the drawing room. Jamie and I exchange brief, rather shy smiles while the adults talk, and then Lena appears and rescues us. We say good night to everyone and go upstairs to my room, Jamie clutching a carrier bag that I can see is padded thick with comics.
‘I brought all the best ones,’ he says as we go up.
I show him around. ‘This is my room. That’s Lena’s room. That’s the bathroom. That’s my parents’ room.’ We are briefly overcome by a kind of formality, but it soon passes.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Do you want to see what we’ve got?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Put them there.’
He unloads his bag and spreads the comics and annuals – which are hardbacked – on the mattress on the floor. At the bottom of the bag are some pyjamas, a toothbrush and a parcel which he unwraps. ‘Sandwiches and biscuits,’ he says, setting them on one side.
‘Ottimo!’
‘Right,’ he says, once the bag is empty. ‘Which one do you want?’
I am not sure. I look over the covers carefully before making my choice. ‘That one.’
‘OK. I like this one,’ he adds. ‘It’s a bit scary.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I say. I keep my slight doubts – how scary? – a secret.
We sit on my bed as if it is a sofa, with our backs to the wall and our feet sticking out over the side. Jamie turns the pages as he reads the story for me. Comicbook conventions are new to me and it is a struggle at first to understand how the story follows through the different images, and what is mean
t by the differently shaped panels of writing that break through them. But as Jamie reads, and changes his voice to suit what is happening, I begin to see that some panels – rectangular ones – tell more of the story, or describe things, while others – rounder ones with tails – are what people are saying. The tails always point the way to the mouth of the person speaking, as if their words have frozen as they say them, and become visible in the air, like breath on a cold morning.
He doesn’t trace the lines of writing like my father, but he does keep one finger under each panel of the story while he reads it to me, so I can keep track of where on the page we are. As the story unfolds, I become mesmerized by it: the plot holds me captivated, while the intensity of the little coloured squares is wonderful to look at. I realize now why Jamie has whole boxes of these things.
We read until Lena knocks on the door and brings us food. ‘I won’t disturb you,’ she promises as she sets the tray down on the floor. ‘Don’t forget to do your teeth. You can bring the plates down in the morning.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
She glances at the comic and looks amused. ‘Don’t give yourself bad dreams,’ she says.
‘We won’t,’ Jamie says seriously.
‘We won’t,’ I echo.
‘Buonanotte,’ she says, and closes the door quietly behind her.
Jamie sets the comic down on the bed while we eat. Looking at it, I can see that we’ve read almost a third of the way through. Time seems to have passed without touching us. I can’t wait to start reading again.
‘Lena’s nice,’ Jamie says.
‘Yes. I like her.’
‘We haven’t got anyone yet,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we will soon.’
I munch away happily.
Jamie says, ‘Next week I’m going to school.’
‘Where?’
‘In the town. We went and saw it yesterday. It’s quite a long walk. The playground’s quite big.’
‘I don’t go to school yet,’ I say, a little uncertainly.
‘That’s because I’m older than you.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be fun. It looks nicer than my last school. Mummy says it’s much smaller, too, and I’ll make friends more easily.’
I feel a stab of something cold inside me at that. Perhaps if Jamie meets other people at school – people older than me – he will stop being my friend. I say, ‘Oh.’
‘I have to walk there every day. We looked at things on the way back so I know where to go – like landmarks.’
‘That’s clever,’ I say. A thought comes to me. ‘I could walk with you – if you like. I know the way.’
‘Yeah?’ he says, sounding pleased and a little relieved. ‘That would be great. I think I remember where to go – but it would be nicer if you came as well.’
The coldness fades away when he says this, is replaced by warm happiness: I can be useful, and Jamie wants my company.
He is looking around my room. ‘What are your hobbies?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mine are comics and astronomy,’ he says. ‘Well, you already know about the comics.’
‘What’s the other thing?’
‘Astronomy’s watching the stars,’ he says. ‘That’s what my telescope’s for. And I have a chart, too, with all the constellations marked on it, so you can look for them.’
On the wall by the window is a strange map, pinned there beside the telescope, marked with strange groupings of different-sized dots. Constellations? This is a chart.
‘What’s a constellation?’ I ask.
‘It’s a collection of stars. They make shapes. There’s one that looks like a big saucepan – there’s a little saucepan, too – and a man with a belt, and lots more. Orion – that’s the man – his belt’s made of three really bright stars in a row. That one’s easy to spot.’
‘Do you know them all?’ I ask.
‘I know almost all of them by heart,’ he says. ‘But there are lots and lots.’
‘I wish I had a hobby,’ I say, looking around my bedroom. Now that Lena has tidied it, it looks strangely empty.
‘Perhaps lizards are your hobby,’ he says.
‘I don’t think they are.’
‘Or perhaps visiting places in your head,’ he adds.
‘Maybe,’ I say, brightening a little.
‘Do you want to go on?’ he asks, picking up the comic.
‘Yeah!’
So we read on. Jamie’s voice is steady and precise. Sometimes the longer words make him pause for a second, but he rarely stumbles. Always I can see by the position of his finger where on the page we are, and the way the images tie in with the story itself – are part of it – is wonderful. I feel as if I am being pulled into the world of the story, through the surface of the paper.
And now something begins to happen. As Jamie keeps reading, and I keep watching the images on the turning pages, a kind of buzzing starts to seep into my head. Through the buzzing I can still hear Jamie’s voice and still see the pictures, but everything else seems to slip and slide away from me. The little boxes and speech bubbles swim and blur on the page, as if they are struggling to break free of it, and their contents – the neat black shapes of the words that Jamie is saying aloud – writhe and twist. Whenever I stare hard at them, they freeze back into immobility; but as my eyes drift, they tremble and shudder at the edge of my vision.
The colours are more intense now than before, and as I stare, I begin to see them with an amazing clarity. The pictures glow larger in front of my eyes until I can see tiny rosettes of coloured dots; red, and blue, and yellow, all intersecting and forming other colours, oranges and greens and purples and browns. All the colours are made of these little wheels of dots; all the pictures are dots; an illusion of dots. The only solid colour – real colour – is the black of the writing, which is clean and clear and unbroken. I trace in my mind the shape of the next word—
Streetlight
and the solidity of it is like cast iron, massive and permanent amid a whirl of coloured confetti.
Then the picture pulls back from me and I can once again see the image itself, and not just the tiny pieces of which it is composed. In it, a man in a raincoat is standing under a streetlight – Streetlight – on the corner of a city street; behind him, a tall building on which stands a masked figure.
Jamie is still reading. ‘… behind the windows. Beneath the streetlight there, he can see the man he has been searching for.’
My breathing catches and hesitates, and I must tense, because Jamie stops suddenly and looks at me.
‘Alex – are you all right?’
‘I think so,’ I say. My head is normal again; there is nothing of the shimmering and whirling that was there a minute ago. Everything is the same again.
‘You looked strange there for a moment,’ he says, sounding cautiously worried, as though he is becoming used to the idea of my looking strange.
‘I’m OK,’ I say, and add, ‘I think I can read.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think I learnt to read,’ I say. I point to the next frame. ‘The man at the desk says, “What happened out there?”’
‘Yeah,’ Jamie says slowly. ‘That’s right. “What happened out there?” But – then you must have been able to read before.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say.
‘Well, why did you learn now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s really strange. You must have been able to read before. Just a little, perhaps.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say again.
‘Well. I mean – it’s good, but it usually takes longer than that, I think.’
‘How long did it take you?’
‘I don’t really remember,’ he says, looking puzzled. ‘I remember reading with Mummy when I was small. But sometimes she was reading, not me.’ He thinks for a while. ‘And at school. Other people at school used to
have to learn to read. And sometimes it took them a long time.’
‘My daddy’s been teaching me,’ I say. ‘But I never worked it out. Until now.’
‘Oh,’ he says, sounding relieved. ‘Oh, well, that’s why, then. If you’ve been learning, then it’s normal, I think.’
I smile uncertainly. ‘Oh, right.’
‘Still …’ He sits for a moment, staring at the wall opposite, apparently lost in thought. It occurs to me that Jamie is staring into space – that this is how I must sometimes look. The thought is very peculiar. Then he turns back to me. ‘Do you want to read for a bit?’
‘Well – OK. But you do the voices really well.’
‘Just for a bit, then. You can do to the end of this episode.’
I prop the book up on my lap. ‘“It’s a bit hard to ex—”’
‘Explain.’
‘“– explain.” – “Start at the beginning, then.”’
Later, when we have reached the end of the section and Jamie has taken over again – I am secretly pleased, because I like it much more when he reads – I find myself thinking briefly how happy my father will be now that we won’t have to do any more stories together. And later still, it occurs to me that perhaps, now that I can read, my parents will let me go to school with Jamie.
‘There’s one,’ I say.
‘That was a big one.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Some of them get through,’ he says, sounding lazy and happy. ‘All the way, and hit the ground. Space rocks.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mm. All the way through.’
My mother says my learning to read is a miracle. My father is, I think, almost suspicious at first – as though he begins to think I have known how to read for months, and have been concealing the ability from him. When the suspicion fades, it is replaced by puzzlement. I am left embarrassed and self-conscious about the whole episode, and keep wishing I had learnt to read normally, instead of in this obviously improper fashion. I am also, secretly, afraid that I might stop being able to read as suddenly and spontaneously as I started. When I tell Jamie this, he laughs, and says it doesn’t go away once you know how; but when I tell him a little more about how it felt when I learnt, he becomes quiet and thoughtful, and in the end says that he doesn’t think I should tell my parents about that. I am well aware of how important it is not to tell my parents everything. I can still remember too vividly how bad things were when I was a liar.